Second Nature

Epizódy

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  E193 Tim Wigmore: What Cricket Can Teach Us About Data, Business, Talent & Risk 17.09.2026 1h 28min

  Rich Stockdale has given away more copies of Crickonomics than any other book. Not because he is obsessed with cricket, although that helps, but because he thinks it might secretly be one of the best business books ever written. Tim Wigmore has spent his career using statistics, economics, history and brilliant writing to understand why cricket actually works. What followed became a conversation about far more than sport: Moneyball for land, why data can make coaches worse, why unconventional...
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  E192 Sam Larner: Why Talent Alone Doesn't Build a Winning Team 10.09.2026 2h 4min

  What if the most valuable person in a rugby team isn’t on the pitch? Sam Larner has spent years pulling apart professional rugby through data. And the numbers expose some uncomfortable truths: teams overpay for experience, coaches repeatedly recruit the same profiles, unconventional players are systematically undervalued, and sometimes the difference between winning and losing is buried among 50,000 data points nobody in the stands will ever see. But this conversation goes much further than r...
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  E191 Nadia Nikolova: The Uncomfortable Truth About Investing in Nature 03.09.2026 1h 37min

  Impact investing has spent years fighting for a tiny slice of institutional portfolios. Nadia Nikolova thinks that is the wrong fight. As CEO of ResponsAbility, managing almost $6 billion across emerging markets, Nadia sits at the intersection of institutional capital, climate, sustainable food and financial inclusion. She explains why impact investments should compete for the same 95% of portfolios as everything else, and why the industry needs better data, ratings, scale and replicability t...
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  E190 Cain Blythe: Stop Trying To Save Nature! This Is How We Actually Fund It 27.08.2026 1h 24min

  For years, the nature sector built projects first and asked where the money would come from later. Cain Blythe thinks that has to change. From the first major investment into Broughton Sanctuary to Credit Nature's expansion across Europe, Africa and New Zealand, the conversation is finally moving beyond good intentions. Where is the demand? Who is going to buy? What return can nature generate? And how do you build a market that can move enough money, fast enough? We get into why the sector st...
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  E189 Nathan Curtis & Ben Stansfield: What Makes A Great Lawyer? 20.08.2026 1h 31min

  Nature is moving from environmental obligation to financial opportunity. But what does it actually take to turn biodiversity, habitat and ecosystem services into something institutional capital can invest in? Nath Curtis and Ben Stansfield have spent two decades watching renewable energy evolve from a new, uncertain industry into an investable infrastructure market. Now they are seeing many of the same patterns emerge in natural capital: from BNG and habitat banks to regulation, offtake contr...
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  E188 Tom Crowther: Stop Trying To Save The World 13.08.2026 1h 47min

  For years, the environmental movement told us to be afraid of the future. Tom Crowther thinks that story has run its course. From discovering 3 trillion trees on Earth to watching his trillion-tree research explode into a global movement, and then become one of the most criticised ideas in environmental science, Tom has seen what happens when a scientific idea escapes the lab. He talks about the backlash, the mistakes, the lessons, and why nature is finally becoming part of the economic and p...
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  E187 Katie Neck & Elena Doms: Building A Movement 06.08.2026 1h 8min

  Nature doesn't have a science problem. It has a communication problem. From Formula 1 paddocks to boardrooms, from global brands to Climate Week, Katie Neck and Elena Doms explore why the future of conservation depends less on convincing people they're wrong and more on showing them what's possible. Commercial thinking, personal brands, storytelling and optimism aren't distractions from protecting nature—they might be the reason more people join the mission. Along the way, they discuss why Fo...
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  E186 Ollie Potter & Kevin Webb: The Nature Tech Revolution 30.07.2026 1h 43min

  Everyone agrees nature matters. Almost nobody understands where the real opportunity is. Nature tech is quietly becoming one of the most important investment themes of the next decade. AI is changing conservation faster than most people realise. Data centres are forcing a rethink of environmental infrastructure. And the companies that solve biodiversity, agriculture and ecosystem restoration won't just protect the planet—they'll build entirely new markets. Rich sits down with Ollie Potter, fo...
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  E185 Benedict Macon-Cooney: Winning The AI Century 23.07.2026 1h 32min

  Everyone agrees AI will change the world. Almost nobody is asking what happens when governments built for the industrial age try to govern the intelligence age. Benedict Macon-Cooney has spent over a decade inside the Tony Blair Institute, advising political leaders around the world on AI, state capacity and government reform. This isn't a conversation about chatbots. It's about whether Western governments can still deliver, why public services are getting more expensive while outcomes deteri...
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  E184 Soma Pitiryi: The Human Algorithm 21.07.2026 1h 53min

  Everyone talks about product-market fit. Hardly anyone talks about founder-market fit. Soma Pirityi believes we've been measuring startups the wrong way. After building businesses, losing money, working in venture capital and studying AI, risk and entrepreneurship across Cambridge, UCL and St Andrews, he reached a simple conclusion: companies rarely fail because of the spreadsheet. They fail because of the people behind it. This conversation explores why founders romanticise failure, why AI w...
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  E183 James Cameron: The Lawyer Who Changed Climate 16.07.2026 1h 39min

  James Cameron has spent four decades operating where politics, business and the environment collide. He helped shape modern international climate law, advised governments across the world, founded one of the first climate investment businesses to manage over $1.7 billion, and still believes the biggest opportunities are ahead of us. But this conversation isn't really about climate. It's about reinvention. About being expelled from school twice before becoming one of the world's leading legal ...
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  E182 Luke Baldwin: Rarer Than Diamonds 09.07.2026 1h 25min

  Luke Baldwin started a carbon credit business in 2023 — by his own admission, the worst possible year to do it. The market was in freefall, trust was gone, and nobody was buying. Two years later, his business closed the first deal in the world to capitalise future carbon removals as an intangible asset on a corporate balance sheet. This conversation goes into why the environmental sector still hasn't built a product good enough to compete for capital, why "voluntary carbon markets" is the wro...
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  E181 Clifford Chance, Live: The Honest Room 02.07.2026 51min

  Five years ago a carbon credit was $1 and largely a joke. Today it's hundreds of pounds a tonne, rated, insured, and traded on an exchange. The people who did that are in this room. Live at Clifford Chance during London Climate Action Week 2026, Rich convened a panel that doesn't usually end up on record together: a Magic Circle funds lawyer, the CEO of Climate Asset Management, a conservation operator negotiating the contracts that underpin gold-standard carbon credits, the CEO of the Lifesc...
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  E180 Nature Inc. Live: Live From London Climate Week 30.06.2026 1h 4min

  The economy has always been a subsidiary of nature. We just didn't have the instruments to prove it. Now we do — and the conversation is getting uncomfortable in the best possible way. Recorded live at London Climate Week, this is the conversation the sector has been having in private, finally happening in public. Tripp Wall of Pantheon Regeneration, Siddarth Shrikanth of Just Climate, and Dimple Patel of NatureMetrics spend 90 minutes on the hard questions: where capital is actually moving, ...
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  E179 Allister Furey: Manufacturing Trust 25.06.2026 1h 23min

  Allister Furey trained as a biologist, fell into AI before anyone called it AI, built kite-powered wind energy systems, sold a company to a competitor, ran operations in Singapore, and ended up building a carbon ratings agency. Not because it was the plan. Because the market was lying and someone had to say so. Allister is CEO and co-founder of Sylvera — the data business that rates carbon and commodity credits, prices geospatial data, and tries to inject statistical rigour into a market that...
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  E178 OC Round Table: Building A Dynasty 18.06.2026 1h 47min

  Five years ago there was no portfolio. No team. No podcast. No estates. The highest carbon credit price was under £20. Biodiversity net gain didn't exist. Rich had a business plan and a conviction that you couldn't scale conservation without capital — and almost everyone told him it was too complicated, too risky, or too ambitious. This episode is the five-year reckoning. Gathered with three of the people who built it with Rich Stockdale: Fiona Milden, Managing Director; Andrew Dewar, Head of...
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  E177 Asger Strange-Olesen: The Additionality Problem 11.06.2026 1h 38min

  Asger Strange Olesen has spent 15 years building context most people in this space only claim to have. Carbon developer, EU Climate Directorate, FSC Global Chief Climate Officer, now heading climate and biodiversity at IWC — a $6bn forestry asset manager backed by BNP Paribas. He has been inside the policy rooms, the certification bodies, the investor meetings, and the forest itself. This conversation goes to places the sector tends to avoid. Why additionality — the foundational rule of the c...
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  E176 Richard Kelly & Robert Guest: Britain Is Running Out of Trees 04.06.2026 1h 33min

  Richard Kelly and Robert Guest were employees 63 and 64 at Foresight. They built a £150 million portfolio in 12 months, took it public on the London Stock Exchange during COP26, watched interest rates destroy their share price through no fault of their own, delisted — and then rebuilt. Within months of going private, their three biggest shareholders rolled straight back in. That's not a recovery story. That's a vote of confidence in people. This is one of the most complete journeys Second Nat...
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  E175 Insurance Round Table: The Market Nobody Talks About 28.05.2026 1h 39min

  Everyone talks about capital flows into nature. Nobody talks about what has to be true before that capital will move. Insurance isn't a nice-to-have in natural capital markets — it's the load-bearing wall. Without it, the deals don't close, the banks don't lend, the corporates don't buy. With it, you get carbon credits on a balance sheet as assets instead of liabilities. You get BNG units trading like real infrastructure. You get developers who can actually monetise their projects without loc...
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  E174 Ed Thorne & Greg Robson: Relationships Can't Be Automated 21.05.2026 1h 45min

  Greg Robson and Ed Thorne founded Sand River three years ago with a simple but radical premise: the companies solving the ecological crisis are the best businesses on earth — they just haven't been funded that way. Both came from operational backgrounds. Neither had the next great idea to save nature. What they had was the judgment to find the people who did. This conversation goes deep into how you invest in a market that barely exists yet, what you actually look for in a founder, why valuat...